Paul and Lucy Spadoni periodically live in Tuscany to explore Paul’s Italian roots, practice their Italian and enjoy “la dolce vita.”
All work is copyrighted and may not be reprinted without written permission from the author, who can be contacted at www.paulspadoni.com

Thursday, October 27, 2016

I feel weirdly happy now when I put out right garbage bin on right day

We
have surpassed numerous obstacles in our purchase of a house in
Italy, including starting a bank account, hiring a geometra
and notaio,
setting up all our utilities for automatic payment, obtaining my
carta
di identità
and repairing some problems with the electricity. Until yesterday, we
had one more nagging problem to solve, one that would seem to be
among the easiest—yet it took us almost four months of living here
off and on to figure out the proper way to dispose of our garbage.

Don’t get
me wrong; we didn’t have four months of garbage piled in our living
room. We had found a way around the problem, but we knew it couldn’t
be a permanent solution. We had asked our friend Angelika, whose mom
actually lives in Montecarlo, what we should do with our garbage.
Angelika said her mom, who lives alone, just packs it with her when
she goes shopping and puts it in a dumpster along the way or at the
grocery store.

We figured we
would do the same until we could learn the proper way to do it. We
saw that people put out different types of trash on different days of
the week, and we started taking notice. Monday and Friday mornings,
we saw organic waste bins put outside doors. Since we had inherited a
bin from the previous home owner, we could easily participate in this
practice.

We did have
some problems getting used to the schedule, because we realized that
the pickup came early in the morning, and people didn’t put the
bins out until very late at night or very early in the
morning—logical, since nobody wants to walk past compost bins on
the streets all afternoon in a popular tourist town. But about half
the time, we forgot to put the bin out, and then we either had to
keep the smelly stuff around for another three or four days or take
it to an organic waste dumpster somewhere else. We usually chose the
latter.

Paper
and cardboard were picked up on Thursdays, but we didn’t have a bin
for this. We would keep it in a plastic bag in the kitchen, and then
sometimes we just added it to a neighbor’s bin on the proper day.
But often, our bag would be overflowing halfway through the week (or
we would forget to put it out), so we often just tossed it in our car
when we were going out and looked for a carta
recycling dumpster.

Glass
bottles were picked up every other week, on Wednesdays, but we also
didn’t have a bin for this. For those of you thinking we should
just go out a buy a container, I should mention that the bins all
seemed to be of the same color, shape and size, yet we had never seen
them for sale at the hardware store. It was gradually dawning on us
that they may have been issued by the agency that collects the trash.

What
really prompted us to seek help, though, was the multimateriale
leggero
pickup days on Tuesdays and Saturdays. What fell into this category
of “light multi-material?” And why did people put their
multi-material in special blue bags inscribed with the abbreviation
ASCIT? There seemed to be a list on the side of the bags that
described what could be placed inside, but it was hard to read. We
needed those blue bags, because apparently we couldn’t put out our
multi-material—whatever it was—without them.

It would have
been nice if the city hall people had told us about garbage
collection policies when I received my residency card, but probably
this was a different office, different agency. I could try going to
the city hall and asking, but I knew the answer could be complicated,
and I preferred to have the help of someone more fluent in Italian
than I. So we asked Elena, who asked Davide, because garbage disposal
is a job for men.

Davide said
we had to go to a special office in Montecarlo that was below the
library and only open each Wednesday morning and afternoon until 2
p.m. Luckily, it was Wednesday morning when he told us, so we made it
there in time. The office was hidden away inside an inner courtyard,
in an unmarked room (even though we knew where the library was, we
still had to ask someone for directions to the garbage bin office).

We found a
man behind a desk who asked if we were enrolled. Yes, I had
registered as a resident in the city hall, but that wasn’t the same
thing. I had to be enrolled with ASCIT, and for that I needed the
bill of sale for our home and a document that showed the size of the
house. I had these in my desk at home and returned within 10 minutes.
He tapped on his computer for another 10 minutes, and then went into
a back room and returned with four bins and several rolls of colored
and labeled plastic bags. He also gave me a schedule to post on the
kitchen bulletin board and a booklet that describes in great detail
what goes into each bag or bin.

I carried my
bins and bags down the street to our house—proudly, I might add,
because they symbolized another step forward in our attempt to become
Italian. I went to work translating the instructions and sorting out
our garbage to put it in the proper containers. The translated
instructions and lists are complicated and fill an entire page, but
it was worth it. No more will we need to carry bags of garbage around
in our car. Well, except maybe on the days I forget to put the right
bin out on the right day.

The trash
sorting is a lot more complicated and labor-intensive than in Gig
Harbor, where we have everything picked up once a week with one bin
for the non-recyclable trash and another for recycling, with machines
separating the different articles to be recycled. I doubt that the
Italian program would be effective in the states, because people
wouldn’t have the patience to sort and leave out different items
each day. Lucy’s not thrilled about the idea of having six separate
bins or bags (there is also one for non-recyclable materials) in the
kitchen and on the terrazzo. But the Italian people are more
accustomed to having to cooperate while living in close quarters
while following a plethora of bureaucratic regulations.

For me, I get
some satisfaction out of being able to properly sort out the rules of
living in Italy. Even when they are demanding and sometimes
arbitrary, it’s a little like solving a jigsaw puzzle when we’re
able to put another piece of our life in the right place.

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About Me

First off, before you hassle me about our title, Lucy thought of it. Yes, I know some people may think broad is derogatory, but the etymology is uncertain and she doesn’t find it offensive, and it made me laugh. We have been married since 1974 and are empty-nesters now, which allows me to bring my submerged Italophilia into the open. We first came to live in Italy from February-April in 2011 and have returned during the same months every year. From 2011-2015, we lived in San Salvatore, at the foot of the hilltop city Montecarlo, where my paternal grandparents were born, raised and, in 1908, married. In late 2015, we bought a home in Montecarlo. We come for a variety of purposes: We want to re-establish contact with distant cousins in both Nonno’s and Nonna’s families, we want to learn the language and see what it is like to live as Italians in modern Italy, we like to travel and experience different cultures. Even if we aren’t successful at achieving these purposes, we love Italy and enjoy every moment here, so there is no chance we will be disappointed. I am grateful to God for giving me a wife who is beautiful, clever, adaptable and willing to jump into my dreams wholeheartedly.